Change
agents are enlightened
individuals, change agents are organizations, and some change agents
are current enlightened political initiatives including some UN efforts.These diverse scattered individual drivers of
change, when summed together, gain the synergetic force of an embodied movement
toward a sustainable future for humanity. The purpose of CASM is to reveal the
shape and heading of this movement and to enable the individual voter to help
it grow stronger.

Historical Roots of
the Growth Syndrome:This section deals with a few characteristics
that define our human-nature, and how they enabled pathways leading toward
today’s human predicament.The lack of
long-term vision coupled with greed caused poor choices a few hundred years
ago, with the roots of these bad choices going back much much further in
time.Today’s general growth paradigm
consists of layers of past sociopolitical choices that have become normal.These choices reduced respect for the Gaian
system of life from which we emerged, and we now pay the price for these
accumulated “normal” ways of doing things.

We abuse land
because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a
community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

--
Aldo Leopold, American environmentalist and author

<<^^>>

Human Nature:

Humans are not the clear thinking logic
beings, as we usually think of ourselves.Indeed, most of our daily conscious decisions are based on many
non-linear processes within. Denial, reality avoidance, self-deception, egoism
are an integral part of us.This subject
may be dealt with in greater detail here at a later date.However, this subject was covered in great
detail in two chapters of a manuscript written in 1994, called, A 21st
Century Steward’s Handbook, by Don Chisholm. The two sections can be read
at [part one] [part two]

Two expressions often used by contemporary
writers are useful in developing this section. Western society is described as
being a dominator, society, [Quinn, Moore Korten] with a dominant
perspective: “If you have it, and I (we) want it, I’ll (We’ll) take it because
I (we) can!” The other expression is that of the elite, the rich and
powerful group behind the scenes at the top who actually run the macro
political show.We grass root voters may
get to choose a political party, but when it is in power, no matter what
sincere promises they had made, there are certain areas of governance that are
taboo, cannot be changed!!! [Lincon Kennedy]The democracy we celebrate is very limited. The Dominator or The
Elite are thought as real existing [organizations] by many people or, as
used in this text, they can be thought of as metaphorical nebulous archetypal
generalizations.Usually, Dominator
is presented with male characteristics, leaving the thought that we would
likely benefit if there were a larger female presence at the top of the
political hierarchy. There are at least three historical enabling events
leading toward today’s paradigm driven ecological destruction.

A long time ago:

Step 1: Displacement of feminine
balance: The beginning of androcentrism

Riane Eisler, in her book, Chalice &
The Blade, makes a historical review of many sources indicating that in
early human societies, the female did indeed have a much larger role than
today.Going back to the Stone Age, 30,000
years ago, nude figures of goddesses adorned their rocky cave walls.Evidence of female leadership continued
throughout the following 20,000 years, through the Neolithic era, where
cooperative societies lived in relative peaceful communities.This lasted until about 3000 BCE when Western
cultures and religions began to emerge, dethroning the female goddesses.Female equality has never returned although
progress is being made in some societies.

Step 2: Making humans external to nature

Elsabeth Sahtouris, in her book, Earthdance:
Living Systems in Evolution, points to another detrimental detour on the
road toward our human dilemma.Sahtouris
states that in
ancient Greece, philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the
world.One was that all of nature,
including humans, was alive and self-creative, much like the Gaia model today.
But the other school argued that "real" world could be known only
through pure reason, not through direct experience, as it was God's geometric
creation--permanently mechanical. This mechanical/religious worldview superseded
the older nature-centric beliefs, and became the foundation of the whole
Western worldview and a foundation stone in today’s fatally flawed
paradigm.A principle tenet of this flaw
doctrine is to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature.

Step
3: Removing spirituality from nature

As the
human appetite for growth and increased throughput from Earth’s wealth of
natural resources grew, the growth paradigm demanded that the natural human
spiritual affinity toward nature had to be blunted.The International Society for the Study of
Religion, Nature, and Culture promotes critical inquiry into the relationships
among human beings and their diverse cultures, environments, and religious
beliefs and practices.They recently
produced an
award winning, Encyclopedia Of Religion And Nature. [http://www.religionandnature.com/ern/].Under the subject: “left biocenterism, they conclude: "In order for industrial capitalism to commodify the Earth,
Earth-based spirituality had to be undermined. Left biocentrists believe that
addressing this is a crucial part of any engaged green politics in the
twenty-first century."

Darwin
explained that normally any species will grow in population to the limits of
its nutrient source, and then a balance of births and deaths will hold the
population steady.If an anomaly occurs,
such as discovery of a niche new food source, population will grow to the limit
of the niche supply, and then die off occurs.Die-off will go to either extinction or to the limits provided by the
original natural renewing source of food.

If
we think in terms of [systems], as in the Gaian system, or stable humanity’s
social systems, balancing feedback from various sources prevents system-runaway
and the inevitable crash.With the
feminine view disconnected from the table of political decisions, and with the
human body and spirit extricated from the natural world, key sources of balance
were lost in the human social guidance system.The dominator mentality is able to understand the Darwin logic as it
applies to nature, but unfortunately, because of mental apartheid, it
believes this science is not applicable to them (them = our (your)
society).Psychologist Robert Ornstein
suggests that a form of conscious evolution would be required to orient
humans toward governing ourselves as if we understood the laws of physics and
the laws of nature.But perhaps it would
be the undoing of past conscious changes, as noted above, that would
renew our respect and reverence for the natural nurturing world of Gaia, our
one and only home.

More
Recently:

Mentally
separated from their earthly roots both emotionally and spiritually, the
dominator societies of the world were ready to go forth and multiply, to
explore, to occupy and to improve the well being of their own specific
group(s), even at the expense of others or at the expense of nature.Writer [J.W.Smith] states that all wars are
resource wars.The dominator
characteristic has fueled many such wars in the past millennia.We are now driven by the human developed [growth
imperative] to seek evermore territory and resources.We are without the needed balancing feedback
of stark scientifically illuminated evidence that human activity is far beyond
Earth’s renewable limits.

Rapid
Growth Enabler One - Physical:

Ecological
footprint analysis shows that it would take the renewable resources of 3 planet
Earths to sustain the activity of over 6 billion humans, even with very modest
resource throughput per capita.Using
energy provided only by the human body, by horses, wind and wood, we could
never have exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity to such a degree in such a short
time.What was the niche energy/nutrient
that enabled human activity to go so far beyond planet Earth’s natural limits?The graph below is revealing.

From
the Pandora’s Box of stored fossil energy from millions of years ago, first
came coal, then oil and gas, to provided abundant easy-to-use energy source to
satisfy (to intoxicate?) the dominator’s unrestrained growth imperative.Rapid exponential growth became the norm in
the 20th century.From that
came the belief that energy, technology and the invisible hand of economics can
solve all of humanity’s problems.But
there’s a problem in energy paradise.Peak Oil.] [dieoff.org ]Peak Oil.]

Rapid Growth Enabler Two: Imaginary Money

Early
monetary systems had been commodity-based, where a physical commodity such as
gold or silver was used to back up the value of issued currency.With exponential growth in human population
and in goods and services, no physical commodity was suitable as a value
base.It the 1960s, following the Keynesien suggestion, the world standard US$ was
disengaged from gold.It became fiat,
meaning, a command decree, or let it be.Now a mathematical number, money can be
created with no limits, unlike the planetary resources that money can still
buy.Trillions of dollars enter the
global system each year, bestowing wealth and political power at the elite top
few from where the trickle down economy should provide for all.But statistics show a rapidly growing
disparity between rich and poor. [ 1% own 60%? CCP article].As reported by Jarad Diamond in his book, Collapse,
an accelerating rich poor ratio is a common precursor to societal
collapse.That is not the only problem
in our money paradise.Economic journals
and statements by experts suggest that those who we trust to control the
international money supply claim to have lost control. And due to
globalization and market deregulation, no jurisdiction in the world has the
power to correct this.[Financial post
article]Systems scientists generally
agree that when any dynamic system looses stabilizing feedback, or control, it
will crash. [Bossel on systems]

Let me issue and control the issue
of money, and I care not who writes the laws.

Amshal Rothchild

Dominator
Schools of Thought and the rise of Neoconservativism:

The,
Chicago School of Economics, refers to a think-tank that has shaped the
course of world history significantly since the 1950s.A group of economists, some from Chicago,
shifted US economic thinking from the Keynesian laissez-faire approach.Keynes had enrouraged free markets with macro
regulation by government to assure the public best interest was served.But the Chicago School followed economists
like Milton Friedman in recommending libertarian rules, which are basically no
rules or regulation to economics, corporations, accompanied by the progressive
deregulation and privatization of government services and civil infrastructure.Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan championed
these concepts in their respective countries.The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
were established to promote the globalization of these efforts.And they have generally had brutal results on
the people in countries that have accepted IMF services.The negative results of the neocoservative
agenda have led to very many books with descriptive titles, such as, [The
Cancerous State of Capitalism,] or [When Corporations Rule The World.]

Our
paradigm in summary: The prevailing political forces that guide human
civilization are now in the hands of the imaginary dominator, a male-driven
archetypal character that is greed driven, it has no feminine balance, it has
no spiritual affinity toward Gaia, humanity’s roots in our natural world, and
it is inhibited from recognizing limits-to-growth on a finite planet, and that
we are far beyond these limits.

But
the current grip of the dominator is slipping. Globalization is not meeting the
expectations of its misguided inventors.This is summarized in the opening paragraph of John
Ralston Saul’s latest book, The Collapse of Globalism: And the reinvention
of the world.Chapter One,A Serpent in Paradise, opens:

“Globalization emerged
in the 1970s as if from nowhere, fully grown enrobed in an aura of
inclusivity.Advocates and believers
argued with audacity that, through the prism of a particular school of
economics, societies around the world would be taken in new, interwoven and
positive directions.This mission was
concerted into the policy and law over twenty years – the l980s and ‘90s – with
the force of declared inevitability.”
{TINA, There Is No Alternative!, declared Margaret Thatcher}-dc

Pronatialist Religions & Cultures:

In concert with industry’s need for labor,
and with the feminine balance long suppressed, dominator influence pervaded
some influential religions and some cultures. They created prohibitions against
birth control and glorified the family with many children. This is certainly
not true of all religions and cultures.But these pronatialist forces are still in place today, and represent a
large road-block in the path any hopeful human recovery efforts.

>>Human Activity
Growth<<

^Industrial
prerogative^+^human opulation^

^Resource
Throughput^

^Population
Growth^

^Expanding
Money Supply^

^Pronatialist
forces^

^Fiat^
Money

^Corporate Power^

Banks

Religions

^^

Industrial

^^

Genetic

^^

Culture

^^

Contributory elements to the
deadly, unlimited growth syndrome

Our animal roots provide us with a complex
array of genetic driving forces to enable procreation.However, free and enlightened homo sapience
can make choices.If both economic and
culture/religious pronatialist drivers were eliminated, and if the feminine
voice was free, equal and educated, achievement of global and local negative
human population growth could occur very quickly.

This
section concludes leaving the thought: If the misguide dominator society has
made policy and law that reduces control over corporations and the money
supply, that drives human activity ever faster toward limits, surely any
recovery scenario must consider a revoke of these laws, and even consider the
validity of imaginary money.

End
of Historical Roots Section

Top
of page

Next
section:The Bottom Line

############

Section
notes and links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetypes

An archetype
is a generic, idealized model of a person, object or concept from which similar
instances are derived, copied, patterned or emulated. In psychology, an
archetype is a model of a person, personality or behavior. This article is
about personality archetypes, as described in literature analysis and the study
of the psyche.

Androcentrism (Greek
ανδρο, andro-, "man, male",
χεντρον, kentron, "center")
is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the
masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its
culture and history. The related adjective is androcentric.

Neoconservatism is a political movement, mainly in the United
States, which is generally held to have emerged in the 1960s, coalesced in
the 1970s, and has had a significant presence in the administration of George
W. Bush

The
Project for the New American Century is a non-profit
educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that
American leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such
leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to
moral principle.

The
Project for the New American Century intends, through
issue briefs, research papers, advocacy journalism, conferences, and seminars,
to explain what American world leadership entails. It will also strive to rally
support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international
involvement and to stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy
and America's role in the world. William
Kristol, Chairman

It is associated with neoclassical price theory and free marketlibertarianism,
refutation and rejection of Keynesianism in favor of monetarism
(until the 1980s, when it turned to rational expectations), and rejection of
regulation of business in favor of laissez-faire. In terms of methodology the
stress is on "positive economics"--that is, empirically based studies
using statistics, with less stress on theory and more on data. The school is
noted for its very wide range of topics, from regulation to marriage, slavery
and demography, that it studies.

The term was coined in the 1950s to refer to
economists teaching in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, and closely related
academic areas at the University such as the Graduate School of
Business and the Law School. They met together in
frequent intense discussions that helped set a group outlook on economic
issues, based on price theory.

The school of thought is not the same as the
Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, widely considered one
of the world’s foremost economics departments, having fielded more Nobel Prize
winners and John Bates Clark medalists in economics than
any other university. Only some, but not a majority, of the professors in the
economics department are considered part of the school of thought.

Chicago School theories lay behind much of the
policies of the World Bank from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s,
during which time large portions of the state-owned companies in many Third World
countries were privatized. (Mason 1997:428)

WiciMilton Freidman

Keynesian
economics (pronounced/ˈkeɪnzjən/), also called Keynesianism, or Keynesian
Theory, is an economictheory based on the ideas of 20th century British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics
promotes a mixed economy, where both the state
and the private sector play an important role. Keynesian
economics differs markedly from laissez-faire
economics (economic theory based on the belief that markets and the private
sector operate well on their own, without state intervention).

In
Keynes's theory, general (macro-level)
trends can overwhelm the micro-level behavior of individuals. Instead of the
economic process being based on continuous improvement in potential
output, as most classical economists had believed from the late
1700s on, Keynes
asserted the importance of aggregate
demand for goods as the driving factor of the economy,
especially in periods of downturn. From this he argued that government policies
could be used to promote demand at a macro level, to fight high unemployment
and deflation of the sort seen during the 1930s. This however
is contrasted by Supply-side economics. Keynes believed that
the government was responsible for helping to pull a country out of a
depression. If the government increases their spending, then the citizens are
encouraged to spend more because more money is in circulation. People will
start to invest more, and the economy will climb back up to normal.

A
central conclusion of Keynesian economics is that there is no strong automatic
tendency for output and employment to move toward full
employment levels. This conclusion conflicts with the tenets of classical
economics, and those schools, such as supply-side economics or the Austrian School, which assume a general tendency
towards a welcome equilibrium in a restrained money-creating
economy. In neoclassical economics, which combines
Keynesian macro concepts with a micro foundation, the conditions of General equilibrium allow for price adjustment
to achieve this goal.

More
broadly, Keynes saw his as a general theory, in which utilization of
resources could be high or low, whereas previous economics focused on the particular
case of full utilization.

Next
section…. “He increasingly
believed that economic systems would not automatically right themselves to
attain "the optimal level of production." This is expressed in his
famous quote, "In the long run, we are all dead," implying that it
does not matter that optimal production levels are attained in the long run,
because it would be a very long run indeed.”

DC: Ironically,
our grandchilden may face death exactly because of such misguided belief.

http://www.futurecasts.com/Keynes,%20The%20General%20Theory%20(I).htm

In the source of Keynesian
theory, "The General Theory of Employment,
Interest, and Money,"John Maynard Keynes purports to provide a
"general theory" for self-regulating capitalist market systems. He
asserts that it is applicable generally in all economic circumstances.
Classical concepts, on the other hand, operate only in those rare
"special" circumstances where full employment is possible.&

According
to The
Economist, Friedman "was the most influential economist of the
second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it." [2] In the PBS biography, The
Power of Choice, Alan Greenspan stated "There are very few
people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to
materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few
people." [3]
In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman
advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market
as a means of creating political and social freedom. In his 1980 television series Free
to Choose, which aired on PBS, Friedman explained how the free market
works, emphasizing that its principles have shown to solve social and political
problems that other systems have failed to address adequately. Free to
Choose was later released as a book, co-authored with his wife, Rose
Friedman. The book was widely read, as were his columns for Newsweek
magazine. His writings were circulated underground behind the Iron Curtain
before it fell in 1989

According to The
Economist, Friedman "was the most influential economist of the
second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it." …

Starting as a Keynesian
supporter of the New Deal, Friedman moved to the right in the 1950s
when his advocacy of free markets was a minority view among economists during
the "big government", high taxation, high regulation, welfare
state era. His political philosophy, which Friedman himself considered classically liberal, stressed the advantages
of the marketplace and the disadvantages of government intervention, shaping
the outlook of American conservatives and libertarians.
He adamantly argued that if capitalism, or economic
freedom, is introduced into countries governed by totalitarian regimes that
political freedom would tend to result. He lived
to see his laissez-faire ideas embraced by the mainstream,[5] especially
during the 1980s, a watershed decade for the acceptance of Friedman's ideas.
His views of monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation informed
the policy of governments around the globe, especially the administrations of Ronald
Reagan in the United States and Margaret
Thatcher in the United Kingdom. His ideas were studied throughout
the world, and played a major role in the transformation of China's economy.

The
late Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton’s mentor), Professor of History at
Georgetown University, member of the CFR, stated in his book, "Tragedy
& Hope":

"The
CFR is the American Branch of a society which originated in England, and which
believes that national boundaries should be obliterated, and a one-world rule
established."

Rear
Admiral Chester Ward, a former member of the Cfr for 16 years, warned the
American people of the organization’s intentions:

"The
most powerful clique in these elitist groups have one objective in common —
they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereingty of the national
independence of the United States. A second clique of international members in
the CFR comprises the Wall Street international bankers and their key agents.
Primarily, they want the world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in
the control of global government."

“The
subject of the Perkins-Goodman interview was the author's latest non-fiction
work, an autobiographical account of his several-decade-long stint as what he
called "an economic hit man." In that interview, and in far greater
detail in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins
presented his own bird's-eye view of the inner workings of what professional
economists call "the Washington Consensus," the post-Bretton Woods
system of top-down arrangements among the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, the world's leading central banks, and an interlocking combine of
several thousand multinational banks and industrial and raw material extraction
corporations, that control upwards of 80% of the world economy, including the
lion's share of the strategic raw material wealth of the planet. These forces
have no allegiance to any particular nation-state. Indeed, they are above the
law of nations, and seek a one-world "globalized" empire, under their
top-down vice-grip control. They constitute what Perkins describes as the most
sophisticated global imperial apparatus that the world has ever known. Their
power rests in their ability to enslave entire nations through the mechanisms
of the IMF, World Bank, private debt, and corruption.”